China Locks in its Net-Citizenry

DatedNews writes "China's registry CNNIC teamed up in March with registar i-DNS.net to provide "Internet domains completely in Chinese characters" to the Greater Chinese Internet community. What at first might look like a localization issue could potentially become a powerfull user lock-in and turn out to be a very effective addition to The Great Chinese Filtering."

Comments

I can see it now

[Raul654]

Your attempted to access taiwan.gov.ta has been logged. Reeducation teams are now en route to your location. Please do not flee, you traitorous capitalist.

Dupe?

[John Seminal]

What at first might look like a localization issue could potentially become a powerfull user lock-in and turn out to be a very effective addition to The Great Chinese Filtering

How so, this would lock out people outside of China, not inside China. I don't have any chinese character set installed on my pc, and I would not have a way of typing in that domain name.

If I owned a company in China, and wanted to do buisness in other countries, I would not want a domain with just Chinese characters, my non-Chinese customers would have a more difficult time finding me.

I just don't see how this locks Chinese people into anything. It gives them more choice.

Ah...

[Dan Up Baby]

I love watching China shoot the wings off of its much-prophesied ascendency to world superpower, one authoritarian move at a time.

Remember, CHINA: "It worked for the soviets, right?"

tempest in a teapot

[fliptout]

I read tfa and saw nothing about locking in the chinese netizens.

Look, English literacy is on the rise in China in a major way. With all the influx of foreign investments and foreigners into china, the chinese people are having more contact than ever with the western world. Filtering out everything but chinese characters, while a technical possibility, is simple improbable.

I lived in china a few months last year, and I'm going back for the long haul soon- from what I have seen, the young, college educated Chinese like their access to information, albeit san porn, Taiwan, etc. To restrict their information flow even more would cause an outcry.

Some tech details, and a question

[nstrom]

These LGA people claim to require a browser plugin to use these Chinese domain names. However, it just seems that they're implementing the names using punycode and some new (presumably non ICANN-approved) TLDs.

For example, the domain name "." resolves via punycode to xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. Now we can check this domain via whois:

$whois -h whois.i-dns.biz xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d

i-DNS.net WHOIS Server Version 1-2-0

This service may be used to query the availability of
multilingual domain names. Please visit http://www.i-DNS.net/
for more information about multilingual domain names.

For help with the i-DNS.net WHOIS service, type 'HELP'.

Domain ID: D1148313-IDNS
Domain Name (Native): .
Domain Name (ACE): xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d
Created On: 14-Nov-2004 19:58:54 GMT
Last Updated On: 02-Mar-2005 06:12:50 GMT
Expiration Date: 14-Nov-2006 19:57:30 GMT

... [snipped to get past line-length filters] ...

Name Server: ns1.i-dns.biz
Name Server: ns2.i-dns.biz

and we can actually resolve this name if we use the right DNS server:

$dig xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d @ns1.i-dns.biz

; > DiG 9.2.2 > xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d @ns1.i-dns.biz
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER ;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. 86400 IN A 203.81.44.27

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. 86400 IN NS ns1.universal-names.com.
xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. 86400 IN NS ns2.universal-names.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.universal-names.com. 117755 IN A 203.81.44.40
ns2.universal-names.com. 117774 IN A 203.81.44.27

;; Query time: 821 msec
;; SERVER: 203.81.44.40#53(ns1.i-dns.biz)
;; WHEN: Tue Apr 26 19:49:06 2005
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 148

The question raised here then is the following: why use a browser plugin at all if all is needed is to configure the user's DNS resolver to consult alternate root servers for the new TLDs? The paranoid conspiracy theorist in me suggests spyware, or something else that's not quite kosher.

spam consequenses

[dj245]

Great, instead of spam from a fake address at a pump-and-dump english domain, we can have spam from fake email addresses on domains that appear as a bunch of random characters to those without the language set.